The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza

Building upon their past releases while toning down the craziness in favour of a more purely groove-based approach, Tony Danza may just have accomplished what Ion Dissonance attempted, and narrowly missed, with Minus the Herd. While they lack the finesse and fluidity of Ion, Danza are a slightly less clever, more blunt-edged aural assault weapon, finding a healthy medium between oppressive eeriness and chest-thumping mosh mayhem. The production is beefy, but suffers through anything less than stellar stereos, as the predictably downtuned eight strings hack away at the listener's eardrums in murderous unison with a rigid, uncompromising rhythm section, making for an on-the-whole ugly, but punishing, listen. The glaring problem with this way of doing things is the danger of becoming monotonous background noise, which isn't entirely sidestepped, meaning the album is best taken in small to moderate doses and could have stood to shed a few minutes of its running time in the editing room. That said, it's hard to make a record like this without coming across like insincere trend-hoppers in the this day and age, and Tony Danza have all the heart and bite to make up for their slight lack of originality.